PrestoClient implements the client protocol to communicate with a Presto server. Presto prestodb.io is a fast query engine developed by Facebook that runs distributed queries against a (cluster of) Hadoop HDFS servers Hadoop. Presto uses SQL as its query language. Presto is an alternative for Hadoop-Hive.

PrestoClient currently supports these versions:

• Python
• R language (deprecated, use the DBI client)
• C

I gathered some statistics on performance and memory use of different versions (in a non-scientific way by using time and ps). Results are from querying data from one table and writing this in CSV format to stdout. The resulting csv file would be about 20Mb (but piped into /dev/null). The average best times are shown here:

Note that the memory usage of the C version is so low because the query data is not stored, only passed through.

The communication protocol used between Presto clients and servers is not documented yet. It seems to be as follows:

Client sends http POST request to the Presto server, page: "/v1/statement". Header information should include: X-Presto-Catalog, X-Presto-Source, X-Presto-Schema, User-Agent, X-Presto-User. The body of the request should contain the sql statement. The server responds by returning JSON data (http status-code 200). This reply may contain up to 3 uri's. One giving the link to get more information about the query execution ('infoUri'), another giving the link to fetch the next packet of data ('nextUri') and one with the uri to cancel the query ('partialCancelUri').

The client should send GET requests to the server (Header: X-Presto-Source, User-Agent, X-Presto-User. Body: empty) following the 'nextUri' link from the previous response until the servers response does not contain an 'nextUri' link anymore. When there is no 'nextUri' the query is finished. If the last response from the server included an error section ('error') the query failed, otherwise the query succeeded. If the http status of the server response is anything other than 200 with Content-Type application/json, the query should also be considered failed. A 503 http response means that the server is (too) busy. Retry the request after waiting at least 50ms. The server response may contain a 'state' variable. This is for informational purposes only (may be subject to change in future implementations). Each response by the server to a 'nextUri' may contain information about the columns returned by the query and all- or part of the querydata. If the response contains a data section the columns section will always be available.

The server reponse may contain a variable with the uri to cancel the query ('partialCancelUri'). The client may issue a DELETE request to the server using this link. Response http status-code is 204.

The Presto server will retain information about finished queries for 15 minutes. When a client does not respond to the server (by following the 'nextUri' links) the server will cancel these 'dead' queries after 5 minutes. These timeouts are hardcoded in the Presto server source code.

Source code is available through: https://github.com/easydatawarehousing/prestoclient Additional information may be found here: http://www.easydatawarehousing.com/tag/presto/

Copyright 2013-2014 Ivo Herweijer | easydatawarehousing.com

Most versions are licensed under Apache 2.0. The C version uses the GPLv3 license.